Restoration, renovation and an enduring entrepreneurial spirit all came together beautifully for a local company’s new headquarters in one of Birmingham’s oldest and most architecturally significant historic buildings, the circa-1889 Zinszer Building at 2117 2nd Ave. North downtown.

Originally, the roughly 30,000-square-foot building was the site of the city’s first large furniture store, and it has one of only two remaining Victorian-era cast-iron façades in town. (The other is on the Iron Age Building, around the corner on 20th Street North.) Read on to discover the building’s connection to one of Birmingham’s first female entrepreneurs, see inside and who’s there now.

Zinszer Building history

Peter and Rosa Zinszer and their son, Joseph, moved here in 1854 from Louisville, Kentucky.

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